Note: If you haven't already seen it, please be sure to check out the redesigned Google Lunar X PRIZE homepage. The Foundation has worked hard to try to refine that page to make it more dynamic and user-friendly. With several new fully registered teams to be announced soon, the amount of content on the page is about to increase massively. Hopefully, this new design will help you find the best and most interesting information. Please bookmark it!

In other news...

Last weekend, I traveled up to Boston. I was there for several reasons--to celebrate some birthdays, to visit my brother, to watch the Super Bowl (that one didn't work out so well), and to return to my alma mater to take part in a conference. It was put on by a student-run organization called "Diversity in Careers Awareness," and it was, to summarize, a career fair with panels to show Harvard students that they have many, many career options besides the most typical paths (med school, i-banking, consulting, et cetera). One of the five panels they put together was on Science and Technology careers, and they asked me to join representatives from Apple, Doostang, and Recycline.

This was a fun experience for me, especially since I spent a fair amount of time while at Harvard trying to get the school to provide its students with more information about careers in the space industry (or at least tell them about the cool events at MIT!). It seems that the Office of Career Services there is now doing a better job of that--and on top of that, the students are taking action into their own hands! So, I had a good time.

While showing my girlfriend Harvard's beautiful campus, I also thought I'd take the chance to test out one of the rules of the Google Lunar X PRIZE. In several places in those rules, we require that teams take 360 degree panoramas of the lunar environment. I was thinking about those, and how cool it will be to see them, and decided I should take one for myself! So, below, you can find a quick panoramic I took standing in the middle of Harvard Yard (click to view a bigger, though far from full resolution, version)

A 360 degree Panorama of Harvard Yard. Click on the image for a larger version. Photo Credit: W. Pomerantz

This wasn't done with any special equipment, just with my standard, off-the shelf personal digital camera. Actually, it consists of 15 different pictures that I took while standing on one spot and turning in circles. I then loaded these fifteen pictures into a special program that identifies overlaps, lines up the photos, and distorts them as necessary to line up. You can see a map of the 15 different images below (note that one image spans the edge and so you'll find half-photos on either side). These 15 photos together go all they way around the circle, so you could print this picture and tape it into a circle to recreate a true 360 view.

Yellow outlines show the 15 original photographs used to assemble the 360 degree panorama of Harvard Yard. Photo Credit: W. Pomerantz

The process was incredible simple. If I had planned it better, I could have taken a larger vertical range--I suspect I'm shy of the full Google Lunar X PRIZE requirements. But viewing that panoramic hopefully gives you a sense of what it's like to stand where I stood. You can see the interesting sites (the John Harvard statue, Johnston Gate, Massachusetts Hall, et cetera) and their relationships to each other and to where I stood. Now, imagine if I got even more ambitious and put that into some software to give you a virtual tour of the Moon like 360 "Virtual Reality" image you can find here? These are the kind of technologies that are going to allow the general public to experience the Google Lunar X PRIZE like no mission before.

Finally, if you'll indulge me for a minute, I wanted to talk about one of our board members a bit, as he's been an inspiration for me for several years. The story for me starts back in my very first summer as an intern at NASA, working in the Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at NASA Goddard. I also had a side job as a live-in helper / pseudo-nurse for a fellow NASA intern who was essentially paralyzed from the neck down. We lived in a large handicap-accessible suite at a nearby college, so I had a (for me) unique and educational experience of living with several amazing people who were wheelchair-bound. That same summer, word starting getting out that a company run by Dean Kamen had developed what would come to be known as the iBOT.

To call the iBOT a "standing wheelchair" doesn't really do justice to the enormity of the job it would perform for its users. After spending a summer walking all around DC with friends in wheelchairs, I can have some appreciation for how much of a difference it would make in someone's life to no longer be held back by a broken elevator, or a single step up into a store or, sometimes, even a particularly rough patch of sidewalk. But, having never been in a wheelchair myself, I don't think that I can truly comprehend the psychological difference between being always being below the people you are talking to and finally being at eye-level. For me, it was a impressive feat of engineering; for my wheelchair-bound friends, the iBOT was a transformative technology that promised to literally change their worlds. I found this blog post online that sums it up nicely. I have lost touch with those old friends, but I hope that they were one day able to get an iBOT of their own.

At that moment, I became a big fan of Dean Kamen's work. I grew more impressed when I discovered that he invented the world's first portable insulin pump, and the first portable dialysis machine. I got to appreciate one of his inventions first-hand when my father purchased a Segway to get to and from work each day. And then finally, thanks to his position on our Board of Trustees, I got to meet him in person. He was about as impressive as can be--asking intense and penetrating questions, showing flashes of remarkable insight, and generous with his time, resources, and ideas.

The reason I right this today is that just yesterday, I stumbled across a video of one of his newest projects. It is called the "Luke Arm," and any fan of Star Wars will immediately know why if they watch a video of it in action (fans of the more recent movies probably would argue that it should be the "Anakin Arm"). Once again, Dean and his coworkers have managed to put together an astounding piece of technology that is not only cool but also serves an enormously important humanitarian need. Watching this video, you get that sense that we are really living in the future our parents imagined. Mr. Kamen, my hat is off to you!